Obama's Chicago Communist Mentor

Ronald Radosh, TWS gives a heads up on one of Barack Obama's other old men mentors:

Particularly grating to Obama supporters was Blumenthal's airing of AIM's allegation that Obama had sought to hide the influence a Communist mentor had on him as a young man. In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama mentions a certain "Frank," a black poet friend of his white grandfather's who was a "contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes" and had once had "some notoriety." Frank gave the young Barack some "hard-earned knowledge" (such as that "black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is"). As Obama set off for college, Frank told him that college was "an advanced degree in compromise" and that he should not "start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way."

It was easy for students of American communism to figure out that this was Frank Marshall Davis, a Chicago writer and Communist activist who moved to Hawaii in the late 1940s. That Davis sought to advise the young Obama as he prepared to leave home hardly proves that Davis was a major influence on Obama or that the young man accepted his Communist views. Obama's withholding of Davis's full name, however, does suggest that he worried it might cause him problems in his political career--as if Davis were another difficult uncle like Jeremiah Wright.

Frank Marshall Davis wrote for African-American newspapers in Chicago at one time. Radosh comments on former Washington Post (of Watergate Woodward and Bernstein) reporter Carl Bernstein's raising the issue in the Huffington Post:

It is just as silly, Bernstein concludes, to tie Obama to the Weather Underground as it is to call Clinton a Stalinist. Yet Bernstein and the others have inadvertently opened up two legitimate lines of inquiry: What remains of their old radical ideals in both candidates' present thinking, and how far is each willing to go in exploiting the other's past? If scrutiny of these matters is fair game for them, it can hardly be off limits for the press and the voting public.

And veteran columnist Robert Novak underscores unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers' relevance, as has the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman, noting the importance of choosing allies carefully:

But his comfortable association with an unrepentant former terrorist should induce queasiness in anyone who shares the humane values that Obama extols.

And indeed, Ayers is not the only radical friend and fundraiser Barack Obama has embraced. He sought out similar ties and thinking in his high school and college years.

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